Lead ergonomist
In the company’s Malaysian office, Vijay Thaker, head of HSE, started hearing complaints of neck and shoulder aches, muscle tension and fatigue. He decided that a two-day ergonomics programme of training and assessments would provide relief for his team and boost their health and productivity in the long-run.
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Kuala Lumpur
In-office
Within its walls was plenty of space but the hundreds of Grab employees, but the equipment these employees were using, as well as their lack of knowledge about how best to operate them, was quickly found to be the root cause of many of the complaints.
Despite being a modern office, our ergonomist found that many employees were working without external monitors. This was causing neck and back discomfort as employees were forced to constantly look downwards and hunch their bodies over their laptops while working.
Amongst the employees that did have external monitors, many still reported neck discomfort. Our ergonomist found the cause of this to be that many Grab employees worked with their monitors to the side, meaning they were twisting their necks to see both monitor and laptop screen throughout the day.
Monitors were readily available for all employees, but only 60% of the Grab team was actively using them. The solution, therefore, was for our ergonomist to educate each employee, whether they were using a monitor or not, on the importance of monitors and their correct setup alongside the laptop.
Many employees that weren’t using a monitor were experiencing a related problem with wrist and forearm discomfort. This was because they were using they were typing and mousing on laptops directly sitting on laptop stands, which causes a lot of tension in the wrist and arm muscles due to the wrists requiring a constant state of upwards bend while the laptop is in use.
Like monitors, external keyboards and mice were readily available for Grab employees, but these required a formal request from the I.T department, leading many employees not to bother with the effort of requesting.
The ergonomist’s advice in this case was simple: to employees, she encouraged them to make the request, and to employers, she advised they remove some of the friction in the process of employees receiving external keyboards and mice.
All chairs in the office were of the same low ergonomic value. There was a general feeling of mid and lower back discomfort amongst employees due to the facts that the chairs didn’t offer adjustable back support or any lumbar support.
Chairs were height adjustable, but many employees did not know their ideal chair height. Many of them were sitting too high and had their feet dangling above the ground, causing lower back discomfort.
If more ergonomic office chairs could not be purchased, our ergonomist offered a low-cost solution for adapting the current chairs.
One was to place a cushion or rolled-up towel in the small of the back to provide makeshift lumbar support for the lower back.
To shore up the lower back even more, our ergonomist encouraged any employees with dangling feet to rest them on a flat surface – either a footrest or a small stack of books.
